Written by Hassane ZAKOU, Head of Project Association des Sourds du Niger Association of the Deaf of Niger (NGO ASN)

From 28 to 30 January 2023, a training session was held in Niamey for teachers at the school for the Deaf and teachers at the inclusive college in Niamey. The 3-day training course was organised by the Association des Sourds du Niger (Niger Association of the Deaf) as part of their project “Avec nos mains, faisons-nous entendre” (“With our hands, let’s make ourselves heard”), and focused on building the sign language skills of primary school teachers and introducing teachers at the inclusive secondary school in Niamey to sign language.

A total of 8 primary school teachers and 12 secondary school teachers were involved in the training. The aim of this training is to improve the quality of teaching for deaf and hard-of-hearing pupils in secondary and primary schools by training twenty (20) educational supervisors (teachers and professors) in sign language in Niamey and ten (10) primary school teachers in Maradi.

The specific aim of the project is to ensure that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, deaf people receive quality education by improving the communicative skills of their teachers.

At the end of the training, the beneficiaries said that they had learned a lot about the topics and promised to pass on the knowledge they had acquired to the deaf children in their care.

They also made a number of recommendations:

• Support Deaf and hard-of-hearing children throughout their school careers;
• Urge the government to direct deaf and hard-of-hearing children attending their schools.

After Niamey, we headed for the Maradi region, where we had the pleasure of embarking on the final stage of the mission, which involved training teachers at the primary school for the deaf. It was also an opportunity for us to inform and raise awareness among the rights-holders of the actions to be taken as part of the implementation of the project’s activities.